Next week, a few of your Funion engineers will be air-jetting our way to San Fransisco for the Hackaday SuperConference. This conference will be the crowning moment for the grand prize winner (along with 2nd through 5th place) of the Hackaday Prize, which has been open since March 2015. After many months of hard work from hackers and makers all around the world, the final ten contestants have been selected, and are patiently waiting for word that their prize has been selected for the winner’s circle.

Now keep in mind that if you have a favorite project in the final list of contestants, you can (partially) blame your favorite Pete Dokter for the outcome of the results. He’s been one of the fantastic judges on the Hackaday Prize panel, including other awesome makers such as Lenore Edman of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, and Limor “Ladyada” Fried of Adafruit. He’s been busy the last few months watching, testing, and judging several of the projects in-house, which has luckily given many of us engineers the opportunity to see these projects firsthand. Hopefully he will come away from this opportunity inspired with new project ideas for the next batch of ATP (and will even have time to get the next video recorded for you all). We are looking forward to being able to meet the makers in person, and hopefully see additional demos of their projects up and running.

If you are unable to attend the conference, but still curious about the projects that will be appearing, you can check out the hackaday.io channel for the conference. Many of the groups have been posting their projects, along with material lists, links to code, and other helpful information for the wider audience to check out their projects.

Along with many great projects for the Hackaday Prize, there will be many interesting talks and workshops being presented. There will be workshops ranging from discussions on audio on microcontrollers, Python on USB, and SPICE simulation for circuits. Additionally, talks on hardware startups, documentation for open source projects, and laser shooting robots will also be occurring. Additionally, some of the board members for OSHWA are hoping to get on the schedule for a lightening talk. I also will be putting on a workshop based around the ESP8266 Thing and how you can use that for crowd sourcing project control.

We’ll be posting more details once the conference is done, but in the mean time, you can get started with the Thing with our tutorial here, or the ESP8266 Shield here.

If you’re already working on a project with those, let us know in the comments below. If you have found a different WiFi solution that you prefer for your group projects, share them with the community!

If you’re going to be at the conference, let us know, and catch up with us while we’re there! We’d love to see what you’re hacking on!

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